Musings, leadership tidbits and quotes posted by a retired Navy Captain (really just a high performing 2nd Class Petty Officer) who hung up his uniform a bit too early. He still wears his Navy service on his sleeve. He needs to get over that. "ADVANCE WARNING - NO ORIGINAL THOUGHT!" A "self-appointed" lead EVANGELIST for the "cryptologic community". Keeping CRYPTOLOGY alive-one day and Sailor at a time. 2015 is 80th Anniversary of the Naval Security Group.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Notable Quotable - Center for Information Dominance Corry Station

Captain Cerovsky congratulates CID's newest Chief Petty Officers

“Our Center for Information Dominance (CID) instructors are the reason why CID continues to produce the world’s finest
information dominance warriors,” Captain Susan K. Cerovsky (Commanding Officer) said. “When our graduates leave here,
they are fully prepared to join the fleet and to perform their mission, thanks
to the hard work by these first-rate instructors.”

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

A more accurate statement would read,

“When our graduates leave here, they are as prepared to join the fleet and perform their mission as these instructors can make them in spite of the continual lack of quality leadership, logical decision-making, and accountability that pervades Corry Station.”

From my time as Corry DoT, the instructors carried the day. We had a mixed bag of folks (as is always the case). We had over-achievers, achievers and under-achievers in all of our courses.

At the same time, leadership was a mixed bag as well. Senior leadership is trying to meet higher HQ demands. For the most part, there isn't time for any of senior leadership to micro manage the instructors at the course delivery level. Some of the DIVOFFs and DHs end up being micro-managed because they HAD TO BE. We had a fairly large staff and I found that I only had a small portion of that group that I could count on to get the job done on their own. Those same people continue to excel today.

I don't know how fair it is to say that "in spite of the continual lack of quality leadership, logical decision-making, and accountability that pervades Corry Station.”

I do know that, at our VERY best, we still had a very tough time turning out FLEET READY SAILORS. 20% would be a high number. Even honor grads of our courses still had work to do to become FLEET READY. We got them through all the required curriculum in the time allotted but most of the time, that honestly was not enough.

We have a history of not sending tier-one officers to training commands. Schoolhouse duties are rarely sought after and never come out as "the place to be" during promotion boards. We should have kept the LDO control-grade billets (O4-O6), vice "on-ramping" to 1810 and placed the billet base in the training arena. Mustangs typically excel in that arena, and if there was a clear path for continued promotion and retainability it would make it a more lucrative assignment. I may be mistaken, but I believe the Royal Navy has their senior mustangs teaching and instructing the next generation.

CID has sadly become a place where staff members go to retire or hide from true operational work. In some cases (CTN specifically), the instructors get credit for instructor duty but don't instruct anything, but rather take care of Sailors. "Taking care of Sailors" has become a horrible phrase because it is normally in place of, or a priority over, getting the mission accmplished, but that is a different discussion.

In the case of CID, the Sailors are not provided the proper Sailorization and a clear case of this is the PT program there. "A" school is where you are indoctrinated into Navy culture after bootcamp. We espouse a culture of fitness, yet the students don't PT as a group because the CID/CIDU leadership don't want it to affect their graduation/completion rates because they are demanding too much of the students. So rather than PT prior to class at 0430 they simply don't do it and leave it up to the students. This is a simply example of the larger problem though. "A" school should be demanding of the students and until the instructors there are willing to put in the time necessary we will continue to push out mediocre personnel with a mindset that mediocrity is the accepted norm.

I concur whole heartedly with prior comments and there is a clear solution. Community leadership has yet to clearly define what is most valued by the community. In absense of that everyone guesses at what will get them promoted and mirror images someone they saw as successful, but until there is some guidance provided everyone will guess. One way to make training important is to state in promotion precepts that training experience is valued equal to operational experience and then have the detailers ORDER quality personnel to training commands to fix it. Once a few quality people promote from a training command more people will WANT to do instructor duty, until then mediocrity will continue to breed more mediocrity.

What I never understood is even though Leadership knows there are major problems with our training programs why do they continue to allow the bureaucracy to win out over getting new training in our pipelines immediately? We have CTR’s learning systems and techniques that have been put to rest many years ago and to implement something new takes years to implement. By the time it’s implemented it’s outdated. Also, anyone hear OPNAV’s new training plan for our afloat platforms? Epic Fail on that one and ROI seems to be minimal along with increasing costs across the Navy as a whole with the way they are rolling out this plan. Do we have a Mobile Training Team stood up to teach and assist our Sailors around the world on the latest tools and techniques for their AOR? I know of 1 contractor who does this non-stop for the afloat SIGINT community (who is outstanding), but we have no Officers or Enlisted who can understand these new tools and train our Sailors. We have no commands like FCC, NCF, etc that can get this mitigated while it’s been a huge issue over the last decade. Taking care of our Sailors we are not. We continue to set them up for failure in regards to our training pipelines.

I give her credit for trying but she just wasn't up to the task. This job is simply TOO LARGE to be done by one person. We may have gained efficiency by combining commands but we LOST ALL EFFECTIVENESS. Not her fault that the experiment failed.